Lambda Research has announced early access to the latest version of its flagship TracePro software. Current users can now access version 7.7, while general availability is yet to be announced.
New features in this release include a new Candela plot viewer and an Automotive lighting toolkit. The new Candela viewer allows users to view previously saved angular plots and simulation mode ray-traces, providing access to the luminous intensity or flux per solid angle of previous designs. Depending on user selections in the Candela Options dialogue box, TracePro considers incident rays, exiting rays, or flux that misses all the model geometry during the ray trace as Candela data.
The new Automotive lighting toolkit gives TracePro users a fully featured toolkit to analyse automotive lighting systems; specifically headlamps in regards to ECE, SAE and FMVSS standards. The toolkit provides visualisation tools and regulation tables to certify that simulated results meet the various automotive standards and provides pass/fail criteria for each regulation.
Version 7.7 also features improvements to the photorealistic rendering capability by enhancing contrast viewing with a gamma slider and display of luminance values. These improvements enable designers to have a more accurate, three-dimensional visualisation of the output performance of their luminaire or light pipe design.
Furthermore, users have the flexibility to choose between simulation or analysis modes for ray tracing, enabling them to rapidly and accurately simulate results with minimal use of system resources. TracePro in analysis mode is the only optical software program to automatically compute and keep track of every intersection of light with a surface. Users can track every ray intersection with a surface, visualise rays per user-defined criteria, and plot 3D irradiance/illuminance on every user-selected surface. Simulation mode only remembers ray intersections on those surfaces denoted by the user as important, which uses less memory and allows users to trace billions of rays if necessary.